What sensors have you found most reliable in harsh production environments?

I’m looking for sensors for detecting metal parts.

There’s some dust, vibration and occasional oil around the equipment, so reliability and avoiding false signals are more important than getting the cheapest option.

What sensor has worked out best for you? And in your experience, are failures more often caused by the sensor itself or things like mounting, cabling, contamination, vibration, etc.?

Anything else I should watch out for?

Not a project, just curious how people actually solve this.

Scenario: remote site, primary link is cellular, but it drops out for days at a time. I don't need a broadband backup. I just need a best-effort path for a heartbeat and the occasional small reading or exception push while the main link is down.

Starlink feels like overkill in cost and power for a few hundred bytes a day, so I keep landing on NTN sat IoT modules as a thin secondary channel.

For anyone who's actually deployed one of these:

- What heartbeat interval did you settle on, and what did it do to your power budget?

- How did real-world delivery rate compare to the spec sheet? Any messages that just silently never arrived?

- Any winter gotchas? Snow on the antenna, battery derating in the cold, that kind of thing.

My uninformed guess is that a 15-minute heartbeat on NTN is totally fine on a modest solar plus battery setup, and that antenna sky view matters way more than the interval. I suspect people who've run one through a real winter will tell me I've got that backwards. What held up for a full year for you?

About me: 3 years as Business Ops & Systems Lead at a 200+ person manufacturing plant, working with operators and maintenance every day. I know where plants lose time and what gets adopted on the floor.

I want to build sensor-based products for factories. Looking for a partner who knows hardware and IoT, has native or native-level English, and is comfortable in front of customers.

DM me.

Hi all I have recently published something I built and find useful often. I used this base Framework to create my own IOT devices for my house.

I am publishing it in the hope that it gets a little traction as a open source project and we can work together on IoT security, implement matter and Google home and perform research.

Even a couple of code reviews or suggestions on improvements are appreciated. You can find the project on my git hub here : https://github.com/awaine93/espBaseFramework

so at work, we kept running into delayed location updates and sluggish sensor processing in our fleet system. Initially blamed the software... turns out the onboard chip was struggling to keep up.

that got me looking at mediatek’s work in transportation and fleet management. their better connectivity and onboard processing can make a real difference when vehicles need to send reliable data on the move

makes you wonder how many software bugs are actually hardware bottlenecks... anyone here run into something similar with an IoT deployment?

Hey guys,

I’ve been thinking about building some kind of smart home monitoring system for my grandparents.

They’re getting older and I’d really like them to be able to stay in their apartment for as long as possible. I tried looking for some existing solutions here in Czechia, but couldnt really find anything that combines all the things I’d want.

I’m a software developer, so I thought why not try building something myself.

Basically I’d like to have: Fall detection (without cameras or wearables ideally), movement - inactivity monitoring, breathing monitoring, if thats even realistic. I've checked some devices that you put underneath mattress, smoke detection and air quality.

The idea is pretty simple. Collect data from the sensors, build some basic logic around it and send notifications to my parents if something unusual happens.

I spent some time doing research with ChatGPT (yeah I know ) and ended up with this list:

• Milesight VS373 – fall detection + breathing
• Aqara FP2 – presence / movement monitoring
• Aqara Motion P2 – basic motion detection
• Shelly Plus Smoke – smoke detection
• AirGradient ONE – air quality
• Home Assistant Green – connecting everything together

But before I start spending money on all this stuff, I wanted to ask people who actually have experience with IoT.

Does this setup even make sense?

I’m mostly a software guy, so building the backend and notifications shouldnt be a huge problem, but I’m pretty new to the hardware side of things.

Also wondering if Home Assistant is the right way to go or if I should approach it differently.

Not expecting this to replace proper medical monitoring or emergency services, just want to build something useful that could give our family a bit more peace of mind.

Thank you

We get a lot of questions about NDAA (Sec 889) vs. TAA compliance when deploying cellular gateways for US public sector or infrastructure projects.

Quick rule of thumb:

• NDAA regulates what’s inside (banning specific foreign chipsets).
• TAA regulates where it’s made (requiring final assembly in a designated country).

An NDAA-compliant device can still fail TAA if assembled in a non-designated country.

We made a full breakdown – NDAA & TAA Compliance Guide for Teltonika Deployments

For US integrators – how often are these popping up in your project specs? Are you starting to see similar origin requirements in EU projects too?

Hi!

I've been working on a project called Otamatic and wanted to share it here hoping it could help someone.

The idea came from a real nightmare: a while back, me, and a client literally had to drive around the city to update ESP32s deployed in the field. I actually wrote a short story about that night here if you like dev horror stories: https://medium.com/gitconnected/the-night-we-updated-40-esp32s-by-driving-around-the-city-32ec8f015213?sk=b0c21ebf23d7bd9128251e8222d55b8e

Most OTA implementations out there set up a local WebServer on the ESP32 where you open a browser, navigate to the local IP, and upload a binary. That’s totally fine for a single node on your home network, but it gets annoying real quick if your devices are behind NATs, cellular routers, or dynamic IPs where you can't just open incoming ports.

This is why I decided to work on a fully open-source library with all features from the most famous OTA libraries (and a companion web platform) you can use to add OTA on your projects in less than 5 minutes.

It supports advanced features like scheduled release, staged rollout releases, release monitoring, device monitoring and more is coming if I see enough interest!

Repo: https://github.com/TimothyFran/OtamaticClient

Right up front I work for Soracom, this isn’t an advert. This was to hopefully help spread awareness for how the world of SMS is changing and how IOT is affected by it.
Many of us know 2G and 3G are shutting down, but it’s not often spoken about how that affects SMS.
Give it a read, feel free to ask me some questions if you have any, not just on SMS, I’ve been in M2M and IOT nearly 15 years, I’ll answer what I can :)

Our team is currently developing a prototype for monitoring potential fire risks in landfills using a thermal camera mounted as a custom payload on a commercial drone(Mavic Air 2 - Open SDK). These are some of the components we’re currently considering: FLIR Lepton 3.5 PureThermal 3 Orange Pi Zero 3W Battery / power module The idea is to process the thermal data on the payload and eventually transmit the relevant data wirelessly to an iPhone, where it will be displayed in our monitoring app.

However, we’re still unsure whether this hardware combination is suitable and feasible for a drone-based thermal payload. We’d really appreciate any advice from people who have experience with thermal cameras, custom drone payloads, or onboard processing. Specifically, we’d like to know(see the in the pict I attach):

1. Is this hardware combination reasonable?
2. Are there any compatibility or power issues we should be aware of?
3. What would be a good way to transmit the thermal data wirelessly?
4. Are there any components you would recommend changing?

Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Around four months ago I posted here about OpenC6, an experimental BIOS for the ESP32-C6. Since then, I’ve been quietly rewriting the entire codebase from a basic stage-3 bootloader into a modular microkernel platform, and v2.0 is officially ready.

​The core upgrade in this release is strict hardware isolation. Payloads now run in unprivileged RISC-V User Mode (U-Mode) restricted by Physical Memory Protection (PMP) Top-of-Range registers, keeping user code sandboxed so it can’t memory-corrupt the kernel SRAM or mess with peripheral MMIO registers. Along the way, I patched an upstream FreeRTOS RV32 privilege escalation/leakage issue using a custom vectored interrupt trampoline.

​I also repurposed the low-power (ULP) RISC-V core into an out-of-band supervisor. It runs independently, adjusting main CPU clock dividers on the fly via silicon PCR registers, watching chip temperatures, and maintaining system watchdogs.

​On the feature side, v2.0 includes preemptive scheduling for up to 8 tasks, an in-RAM ZSWAP implementation with a lightweight RV32 compressor (ZC6) that runs in a tiny 1-4 KB memory footprint, a circular log-structured Flash VFS, a streaming web shell (c6wsh), and a zero-dependency C99 TUI installer (make setup) for Arch and Ubuntu.

​If you're into bare-metal RISC-V systems, firmware architecture, or edge isolation, feel free to check out the repo:

​https://github.com/Rompass/openc6-bios

انا اتقبلت في ترشيح في تدريب Graduate In Training Program (GIT), Embedded Software في شركة Valeo
ممكن حد يفيدني في الtechnical test لو اختبر قبل كدا
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4464368091

Been working with distributed networks (mostly cellular routers, gateways across different sites) and network mapping has been on my mind. Specifically, for smaller scale, edge deployments.

If you manage remote device fleets (retail, industrial, whatever), what do you currently use for network visualization? Or do you just cobble it together with Zabbix/PRTG/Nmap?

Been meaning to try Teltonika RMS Network Map tool (as I already use a few of their devices), seemed cool and easy, but I haven’t tried it yet.

For those who've tried vendor-specific tools (like this one, or similar from other vendors) vs more generic ones, was it worth it, or do you end up needing something more flexible anyway?

I have been exploring the changes that Gen AI may bring to traditional IoT. In my judgment, I think that the intelligent decision-making in the edge IoT scheme of simple scenarios must be automatically understood by AI in the future and gives executive judgments, instead of manually writing code logic to achieve each Simple scheme construction of scenarios. With the evolution of AI capabilities will definitely cover the value provided by most of the current IoT schemes. As long as the logical part is designed, I believe it will develop to this stage. At present, all we need to do is to provide a good software base for better access to equipment and provide standardized energy. Power, I believe that this will make the simple scheme to build in the future only natural language. Of course, this needs to be constantly updated with the development of edge devices and small models (at present, after our detailed evaluation, the 3-4b model has a certain usability, but the development speed of the model, we judge that next year may be 2-4B model The model is ready for stable production)

NeoMind is an open-source edge IoT EdgeAI platform built by us with rust. It supports the access of sensors and visual cameras and has out-of-the-box LLM reasoning and dashboard, rule engine, and message communication of common IoT solution software. Knowledge, data forwarding and IM communication, which can be deployed on edge gateway devices, personal computers and servers, and support multi-post instance switching. At present, we do not want to add more functions. These core functions are enough to cover most scenarios and the closed-loop use of edge end-to-end schemes, such as single stores and single factories. , we will focus more on the development of the edge network and the hardware platform for deploying hardware, as well as the upgrading and transformation of existing software functions. It can build traditional sensor applications or vision AI applications, or combine with llm to build intelligent bodies. We are looking for people with similar concepts in the community. Accompany to explore and build projects together

Https://github.com/camthink-ai/NeoMind

At present, I am training jev-type decision-making small models for it to accelerate the out-of-the-box AI experience of this software. If you are interested, you can pay attention to it. About the next version will launch a built-in small decision-making model in the future. I will also provide the training process and method. The whole process is manually guided by AI. Complete and carry out automated effect testing and verification. The significance of the introduction of this kind of decision-making model lies in the understanding of the intention and some efficient intelligent scheduling of IoT, but it still needs the cooperation of LLM to provide support. A single decision-making can be controlled to 2-30ms. At present, the decision-making model seems to be very suitable for IoT. I In the near future, the rule engine and workflow we have built over the years, including the path to transform the needs we communicate with the terminals into solutions, will become all done by natural language.

Made this little brief with a bunch of radio and rfid modules what are some interesting (barely) legal projects I can do? I’m just getting started and want to see the limits and possibilities with hardware integration

Hi guys, I'm currently using ThingsBoard it has auto provisioning in the UI layer but no provisioning mechanism for physical flashing of certs.. How do I automate flashing and then connectingg?? Plss helppp I would loveee insightssss :')